Destination

In the heart of the Lao jungle, on the banks of the Mekong, Kamu Lodge strikes a delicate balance between tourism and the maintenance of the region’s cultural and ethnic heritage. However swift moving the flow beneath our bluffs, the Lodge is an eddy in the rushing currents of our age. A place to slow down. Disengage. An opportunity to live as deliberately as Thoreau, if only for a day or two, fronting the essential facts of the natural world.

Thirty kilometers upstream from Luang Prabang, the Mekong channels between the dramatic flanks of Lao hills, scenery that very well may be unrivalled in the river’s 4,350-kilometer journey to the sea. In his book about a landmark journey from the river’s source to its delta, modern explorer Edward Gargan describes this stretch of the Mekong this way: “Here, wrapped on both sides by jungle, sometimes dense, sometimes scrubbed by slash-and-burn agriculture, the wagon train of globalization had yet to venture.”

Unlike the major rivers of China, where civilization crowds the waters, the river running by Kamu Lodge is relatively pristine. Boatmen drink its waters. Villagers wash clothes in its shallows. This is Laos as the Lao have lived it for ages. No wonder the New York Times recently identified Laos as the #1 place in the world to visit. Our full board packages feature a leisurely return cruise from Luang Prabang to Kamu Lodge.
Beyond the confines of a compound made up of mosquito-free safari tents and stilted, thatched pavilions, Lao beckons. Primitive paths lead to remote villages. Through a wonderland of flora and fauna. Upriver and down, the allure of Lao looms large, whether you’re checking in at the Pak Ou Caves, where pilgrims have placed thousands of Buddhist statues or by some timeless village that looks much the way it did when French explorers first plied these waters in the 1860s.